Regimes of Value in Mexican Household Financial Practices

Abstract

In this article I discuss the workings of regimes of value and the ways in which social, cultural, moral, and economic relations act to structure monetary frameworks. It is based on three ethnographic accounts: one involves Mexicans caught up in the mortgage crisis in California, another focuses on indigenous people in Chiapas whose livelihoods are increasingly relying on monetized transactions, and the third concerns women in Guadalajara who manage to survive on very low incomes yet carry out a range of financial practices, some of which involve complying with politicians’ corrupt maneuvers. I argue for the need to take into account the tools people are able to draw on in making their calculations and the mechanisms by which information is formatted within certain frameworks to include, exclude, transform, deny, or curtail interpretations and understandings.

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